Email is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers need to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages. Email messages can include textual, graphical, audio, video, and comparable content.
While other forms of networked communications are proliferating, email is still the prominent one among business and personal users. In an organizational environment, users may exchange emails with a variety of other users on a number of topics such as projects, discussion topics, themes, etc. In typical email applications, users' mailboxes are commonly arranged in several folders. Some folders are built-in; others may be created by the users. Email client applications with limited storage traditionally synchronize emails stored in a subset of the folders and only some of the emails of those folders (based on time received). However, “conversations”, which are groupings of emails identified by a common attribute (e.g., subject, thread topic, participants, etc.), can be spread across different folders. For example, some emails belonging to a conversation may be in the incoming mail folder, others in sent mail folder, yet others in user created folder(s). Thus, a traditional email client application may be able to keep up-to-date status information on conversations.